


futurisms

by constellatory



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-06-15
Updated: 2012-06-15
Packaged: 2017-11-07 18:52:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,441
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/434269
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/constellatory/pseuds/constellatory
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dave-centric. Reflections on life and dreams after the game ends, featuring a dash of music. It's getting dark, too dark to see, but baby, the kids are alright.</p>
            </blockquote>





	futurisms

**Author's Note:**

> First direct-to-AO3 fic! I wrote this a long time ago and have only recently finished it. Hints at John/Vriska because fuck you I love that ship. Still, Dave is my strongest writing muse where Homestuck is concerned, so this is pretty much all about him. This fic might get overhauled in the future to add a lot more music.

He wakes up in the nights, now, dreams painted in broad swathes of green and black and red lingering behind his eyelids, drenched in sweat like he's run a marathon, clothes twisted, hair askew. The first few times it happens the reality of it is so intense that pure bright panic sends him hurtling out of bed before his mind catches up with his body, only realizes what he's done when he's standing in front of the mirror, but even then all he sees is blood. All over his hands, his shirt, his face, his neck, his hair, reflected in his (bright red, candy red, blood red) eyes, and he sees bullet holes and stab wounds and throats sliced, and he's ricocheting off the walls, desperately grabbing for something solid to anchor him _i don't want to die i don't want to die_ , until finally he ends up on the floor, panting, finally fully awake, to realize too slow that nothing is wrong. He isn't dead, or dying. It's all over. It's all _been_ over for a while now.  
  
And usually in those moments, he grabs his hair, curls up, curses hot and low and tight between clenched teeth and if a wall is close enough, sends a fist flying. The first few months his knuckles are constantly scabbed over or freshly ripped up, but no one asks him about it. They know better than to ask.  
  
After all, they're all coping with it in different ways. All four of them are irreparably damaged, and all four of them learn to deal with varying levels of gracefulness, or lack thereof. (Mostly lack thereof.) John is fine, mostly, which surprises no one, because he's John and he seemed to handle all the shit the game threw at them the best out of anybody, even though he saw his dad dead and he himself died like, three times, which Dave told him was chump change and John said wow dave, that's morbid. But yeah, he's fine, because he always believed they'd save the world and everything would be okay, because apparently that's what John Egbert does, is be the beacon of goddamn hope for everyone ever. The one thing Dave does know is that John used to think, maybe still thinks even now, about Vriska sometimes, or at least wonder what might have been. He knows because John told him once, eyes downcast and voice uncharacteristically gentle, a little lost and a little sad and just a little bit bereaved, and Dave was never sure how he felt about that.  
  
Jade is a little more broken than John, but she's also subtler than him, so it's hard to tell, sometimes. Dave will get calls at 3 in the morning, quiet, and she chirps at him, but he can always hear it in her voice, that rough low quality that tells him she's been crying or at least awake for more than 36 hours, and he never minds when she does it because it keeps him from dreaming, too. She admits to him, just once, that she doesn't remember being killed, but _killing_ , and there is a hush to her tone, so soft and so so fucking bitter, angry, regretful, ashamed, dark dark black and not like her at all, and he knows _exactly_ what she means and hates himself a little for it. They never talk about it again after that, maybe because he told her _Sorry_ and it was all she'd ever wanted to hear, all she'd really needed to keep the black hounds baying in her dreams off her heels. Sometimes she asks him to stay on the phone with her until she falls asleep, and he's okay with that too, because hearing her breathe reminds him as he stares at the shadows and ceiling that she's still alive.  
  
They dream normally now, like fucking normal people do, because the constructs of the game have been dismantled, and normal people dreams kind of fucking suck, as it turns out.  
  
Rose is like Dave, and maybe harder hit even than he is, but she is so meticulously, scrupulously, perfectly Rose that it's basically imfuckingpossible to ever tell how bad she is or if she never sleeps because fucking nothing ever wipes the serene smile off her face anymore. Dave sometimes gets on her case about the grimdarkyness, harking back to it, mocking and poking and prodding because maybe it was the only time in her life, he realized way later, that she was ever really honest with herself and everyone around her about how she felt. So fucking angry, dark black and oozing like corpse blood, lashing out wild like lightning in a storm. He wonders sometimes if maybe she shouldn't do that again, or who she'd break if she did, but maybe it might be good for her to stop pretending every once in a while. She brushes him off, always gently and only very rarely with an edge of tension, and the one time he rolls over his phone in his sleep at 4 AM and manages to call her and the venom in her voice when she picks up lances into his fucking soul and pulls him out of dreaming and into full wakefulness in about half a second flat is the one time he decides not to fucking ask her about it.  
  
One day Dave looks in the mirror and sees the flash of an orange wing, and before he realizes what he's doing the mirror is shattered, spiderwebbed cracks flaring out hundreds of reflections, hundreds of Daves, and that just makes him hate it more.  
  
They have futures now, lives, and it's so fucking bizarre, because he feels like he lived six lifetimes already, a day and three years and a day, and he's so _tired_. It's easy to hide under shades, which he still wears, because he can and because he wants to and part of him, he feels like, ought to stay the same, _deserves_ to stay the fucking same instead of getting wrenched away like so much else, ripped right outta his chest and cast away to be lost in paradox space. He thinks about that too, sometimes, how much of that shit exists outside of the game's elaborate constructs, what's really there and what really isn't and what was essentially program code and what isn't and _is there a fucking difference even_ and always quickly decides he doesn't give a shit. Instead he stays in fucking Texas and lives a fucking life and sometimes it feels great, awesome, to be the Dave of Guy he wanted to be since meteors destroyed his goddamn planet, and sometimes it feels so hollow and fake he wants to vomit. Sometimes he does, when he gets flashbacks, but those are few and far between and usually ain't no one around to see them.  
  
He's fine. It's okay. They're all okay. _The kids are alright_ , says the radio, and dear sweet fuck is that ever an old song, but he doesn't care so much.  
  
The radio says other things, too. _The dreams in which I'm dying are the best I ever had._ He actually fucking hates that one because it gave him nightmares once like he's some goddamn impressionable child and no, he doesn't fucking talk about it. The radio speaks and he only sometimes listens, because it's only sometimes right.  
  
That's usually the way of things. How it went, how it goes. They all discovered what a huge fucking nerd he was on the ship, how abstractly and profoundly weird and awkward he really turned out to be, and sometimes it was such a burn on his record, a bad cramp in his moving, musical style, to be found out as a huge dork. It was maybe inevitable, and it carried him through, a little. The normalcy. It wasn't normal, at all, but it also was, because it had to be, because it was three goddamn years of the same fucking boring normal disgustingly plainly _excruciatingly average thing_. And then it all kicked off again, high gear, no fucking breaks, and it's all so fucking surreal, the incredible fits and starts and intense motion that sburb/sgrub/whatthefuckingfuckever brought on.  
  
He's tired. They're all tired. They're normal but they're not normal. Their smiles sometimes break their faces and veer a little too sharp or a little too plastic. Their eyes sometimes weigh so heavy, fill in so damn dark, it's a fucking struggle just to look up at the world and see that it's still there.  
  
Or maybe it's just Dave. He doesn't know. He doesn't ask.


End file.
